In addition to utilizing nowCOAST's jumpbar, table of contents, or map tools to navigate to your area of interest and view your desired map
layers, parameters may be appended to nowCOAST's URL to create bookmarks of your desired view. Both your area of interest (referred to here
as "bounding box") and your desired visible map layers can be specified in the URL string. Any layers specified as "Visible" in the URL string
as well as all default nowCOAST layers (background layers, weather radar mosaic, and GOES satellite imagery) will be automatically turned on
when your image loads.

In order to specify what layers you'd like to be visible, you must begin with the base URL of nowCOAST, http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/, and append
to it "?VisibleLayerIDs=" followed by a comma-delimited list of layer identifiers. For example, if you wanted to view nowCOAST with Air
Temperature and Wind on-map surface observations turned on by default, you would use the following URL:http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/?VisibleLayerIDs=OBS_MET_TEMP,OBS_MET_WIND

The table below lists each of nowCOAST's data layers with their corresponding
layer identifier for use in these bookmarkable URLs:

In addition to specifying your desired visible layers in the URL, you can also specify your area of interest using latitudinal & longitudinal
values. The values specified in the URL must be in decimal degrees and must follow the form of: http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/?BOX=MinX:MinY:MaxX:Maxy,
where MinX and MaxX are the minimum and maximum longitudinal extents, respectively, and MinY and MaxY are the minimum and maximum latitudinal
extents. For example, the URL for a view of the continental U.S. is: http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/?BOX=-128.3:21.4:-63.9:54.5.
Additionally, you can combine both of the techniques covered on this page to obtain a bookmarkable view of your area of interest with your desired
visible map layers turned on by default. This is done by combining the two strings with an '&' symbol. For example, if you wanted to bookmark
a view of the Great Lakes with the Air Temperature and Wind surface observations turned on, you would use the following URL:
http://nowcoast.noaa.gov/?BOX=-92.77:40.67:-74.62:49.99&VisibleLayerIDs=OBS_MET_TEMP,OBS_MET_WIND.

Below is a list of list of links to nowCOAST for specific coastal regions throughout the U.S. These links, as well as those described above, are "bookmarkable," meaning that
if you would like to set a browser bookmark to any of these links, whenever that bookmark is used the nowCOAST viewer will open directly
to the area specified. This list consists of the same geographic regions that are found in the "Location" pulldown menu in the nowCOAST viewer.